Uncut
Curated by taste and lineage

A smiling man stands in a warehouse down that alley, beckoning, and everyone who has seen him is missing. Today you have no choice but to take that alley.

It starts as a rumour going around school, and the store page words it the way a rumour actually gets worded: down a certain alley there is a warehouse, and a smiling man stands there beckoning. Anyone who sees him is drawn to the warehouse and goes missing. Then one day, on your way home, you have no choice but to take that alley. You get close to the warehouse, the door opens by itself, a hand comes out, and by the time you wake up you are somewhere else. What follows is a first-person chase horror in the other side of a Japanese residential neighbourhood: you look for the items you need to get out while the smiling man walks the place looking for you. The store calls it high-speed horror, and the reason it can is the energy drink, a consumable you spend to run, so the resource you manage is not ammunition or health but how long you are allowed to be faster than the thing behind you. It is thirty minutes to an hour, with two endings and three branching ending movies, at ¥420. Steam's user tags catch the texture better than the official genre does, putting Walking Simulator, Hidden Object, Immersive Sim, FMV and Dogs next to Horror. Made by TI-BA, one person; AUTOMATON's Japanese edition describes them plainly as a domestic solo developer, their YouTube channel is under the name Chiiba, and their blog profile says they mostly make horror games in Unity, with a personal Gmail as the only contact. Steam's developer search under that name returns exactly one title, though a check of their blog turns up a phone game they self-released earlier with no publisher attached to it either. Released April 24, 2025, it is at 95 percent across 69 reviews (66 positive, 3 negative), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access. Steam's content descriptors are completely empty, there is no mature content section, and nothing in its nineteen user tags is sexual. There is an AI disclosure and this site does not paper over those, so here is the whole of it: the developers say they use AI-generated images of fictional characters in certain parts of the game, which the Japanese version specifies as photographs of people appearing in the fictional in-game advertisements. That is the extent of it; the disclosure covers no other category. English and Simplified Chinese are supported alongside Japanese, and of the 69 reviews, 25 are Japanese, 15 English, 13 Korean and 11 Simplified Chinese. Fifteen English reviews is more Western pickup than most picks on this site have, and it is worth saying plainly: some streamers have found this. What has not happened is a single editorial article in English.

Published 2026-07-31

01First, the one feeling

02Who this is for (and who it is not)

For you

  • You want the Shadow Corridor shape in a modern setting: something walks the map looking for you while you walk it looking for the way out, with no fighting anywhere in the design
  • You want the small, complete kind of thing: one person, one title on all of Steam, thirty to sixty minutes, two endings, ¥420, and a store page that says streaming is welcome with no need to ask first
  • You want a clean content record: Steam's content descriptors are completely empty on this one, with no mature content section at all

Not for you

  • You object to any AI-generated asset. There is a disclosure here, narrow but real: AI-generated photographs of people used in the fictional advertisements inside the game. Nothing else is covered by it, but if that alone is a dealbreaker, this is not your pick
  • You want something genuinely untouched by Western players; 15 of its 69 reviews are in English, which is more than most finds here, and the claim this site is making is narrower than usual: streamers have found it, editors have not

03The roots of this taste

95% positiveonly 69 reviews — yet almost no one has found it

Niconico-san Buried gem

It starts as a rumour going around school, and the store page words it the way a rumour actually gets worded: down a certain alley there is a warehouse, and a smiling man stands there beckoning. Anyone who sees him is drawn to the warehouse and goes missing. Then one day, on your way home, you have no choice but to take that alley. You get close to the warehouse, the door opens by itself, a hand comes out, and by the time you wake up you are somewhere else. What follows is a first-person chase horror in the other side of a Japanese residential neighbourhood: you look for the items you need to get out while the smiling man walks the place looking for you. The store calls it high-speed horror, and the reason it can is the energy drink, a consumable you spend to run, so the resource you manage is not ammunition or health but how long you are allowed to be faster than the thing behind you. It is thirty minutes to an hour, with two endings and three branching ending movies, at ¥420. Steam's user tags catch the texture better than the official genre does, putting Walking Simulator, Hidden Object, Immersive Sim, FMV and Dogs next to Horror. Made by TI-BA, one person; AUTOMATON's Japanese edition describes them plainly as a domestic solo developer, their YouTube channel is under the name Chiiba, and their blog profile says they mostly make horror games in Unity, with a personal Gmail as the only contact. Steam's developer search under that name returns exactly one title. Released April 24, 2025, it is at 95 percent across 69 reviews (66 positive, 3 negative per Steam's own review API), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access. Steam's content descriptors are completely empty, there is no mature content section, and nothing in its nineteen user tags is sexual. There is an AI disclosure, and here is its full text: the developers say they use AI-generated images of fictional characters in certain parts of the game, which the Japanese version specifies as photographs of people appearing in the fictional in-game advertisements. English and Simplified Chinese are supported alongside Japanese. Of the 69 reviews, 25 are Japanese, 15 English, 13 Korean and 11 Simplified Chinese, and not one editorial article about it exists in English.

Give it your first pass

Kageroh: Shadow Corridor The critical echo

The origin of this taste: Kageroh: Shadow Corridor, the Japanese indie horror that came out of the free-game scene and set the shape this pick inherits. Its contribution was to make the horror a matter of movement through a space rather than a sequence of set pieces: something walks the map looking for you, you walk the same map looking for what you need, and the game is the overlap between those two searches. You are never fighting; you are managing where you are. Niconico-san is not an official Shadow Corridor work, and this lineage is a comparison drawn by this site rather than a stated influence. The two part on setting, which is the interesting bit. Shadow Corridor's world is a traditional Japanese elsewhere, deliberately unplaceable. Niconico-san puts the same chase into a present-day residential neighbourhood and the back side of it, so the thing walking the map is walking somewhere you could give directions to.

04Make this gem shine

If it speaks to you, check it on Steam and give it your first pass. Your push is what makes a buried gem shine.

See it on Steam

05The bloodline of this taste